Einstein called imagination "more important than knowledge," yet we increasingly treat it as a childhood pastime we outgrow. Philosopher of mind Amy Kind argues that it's something far more practical: the skill we draw on to make our hardest decisions, read the people around us, and work out who we want to become. Like any skill, it weakens without use — and we're using it less. Reading for pleasure has nearly halved in two decades, fewer parents play with their children each day, and we increasingly hand our creative work to machines. If we don't make time to exercise it, we'll lose the capacity to conceive of things being other than they are, and risk being trapped in the present, unable to imagine a different future, let alone build one.

In recent years, amidst the hustle and bustle of contemporary life, people are devoting considerably less time to imaginative activities. Significantly fewer people are reading for pleasure today compared to 20 years ago, and in just the last decade, significantly fewer parents are making time to play with their children on a daily basis than used to be the case.

This neglect of imagination has been accelerated by the increasing reliance on generative AI tools in both personal contexts and professional contexts. In one recent survey, more than 50% of adults reported interacting with AI tool at least several times a week for personal purposes, often for learning, entertainment, or supporting their children’s education. In another study on business uses of AI, more than half of firms surveyed reported using AI in the creation of new products and services and, more generally, in their at innovation projects. With each passing day, we seem to be increasingly more willing—and perhaps even eager—to outsource our creative and imaginative efforts to machines.

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Not only does imagination enable us to escape the world in which we live, but it also helps us to learn about the world in which we live.

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Should we worry about these trends? Given a longstanding tradition in philosophy that dismisses imagination as unimportant, or worse, views it with disdain, perhaps the neglect of imagination is nothing to be troubled about. One might even think it is something to be celebrated. This would likely be the attitude taken by someone like Blaise Pascal, who saw imagination as essentially deceitful and deceptive—the “mistress of error and falsity”—or by Plato, who famously wanted to ban the poets from his idealized city; poetry, in his view, appeals to our passions rather than to our reason.

But the dismissal of imagination, in my view, is a deep mistake. Imagination lies at the very heart of who we are as humans, and a world without imagination would not just be impoverished but dysfunctional.

The dual nature of imagination

Even if one distances oneself from the deep pessimism evidenced by Pascal and Plato, one might still be disinclined to see much practical significance in the neglect of imagination. After all, isn’t imagination simply a matter of whimsy? It’s only when we’re looking for fun, or when we’re trying to escape from the dreary circumstances in which we find ourselves, that we turn to imagination. When we’re engaged in serious pursuits, whether scientific discovery or some other form of knowledge creation, imagination has no role to play. Or so the thought goes.